Dvapara Yuga

Dvapara Yuga is the third age, of 864,000 years, two units of 432,000, in which dharma stands on two legs. The texts describe disease, discord and desire entering the world, the Veda divided into four parts because no one can any longer hold it whole, and the lifespan further shortened. The Mahabharata war is placed at the end of this age, and the death of Krishna is traditionally taken to mark its close and the beginning of the Kali Yuga. The name comes from dvapara, the throw of two. The four ages together make a mahayuga of 4,320,000 years; a thousand mahayugas make a kalpa, a day of Brahma, followed by a night of the same length, and the whole is contained in the life of Brahma of a hundred such years, so that the scheme reaches figures of the order of 311 trillion years.

Tradition credits the division of the Veda in this age to the sage Krishna Dvaipayana, known as Vyasa, arranger, who is said to have taken the single Veda handed down from the earlier ages and organised it into the four now known, entrusting each portion to a disciple: Paila received the Rig Veda, Vaishampayana the Yajur Veda, Jaimini the Sama Veda and Sumantu the Atharva Veda. The Puranas describe this dividing of the Veda as a recurring task rather than a single event, performed by a Vyasa in every Dvapara Yuga because unaided human memory can no longer hold it whole; the Vyasa of the present cycle, also credited with compiling the Mahabharata and the Puranas, is by far the most famous holder of the title. Some tellings pair Balarama with Krishna as a further avatara of this age, his elder brother and companion through the Mahabharata's events.

The best known modern reworking of the yuga scheme is that of Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, set out in Kaivalya Darsanam, published in 1894 and usually known in English as The Holy Science. It proposes that the traditional figures were inflated in transmission, that the cycle is 24,000 years rather than 4,320,000, and that it ascends as well as descends, so that humanity is now in a rising Dvapara rather than a descending Kali.

That proposal is a nineteenth-century argument with a named author and a printed source, and the atlas records it as such. It is not the Puranic scheme, it is not presented as such by its author, who argues explicitly against the received figures, and it has no standing in the classical corpus.

Its influence has nonetheless been considerable, particularly through the lineage that transmitted it and through the twentieth-century literature connecting yuga cycles with the precession of the equinoxes, a period of roughly 25,800 years that is close enough to 24,000 to invite the comparison. Whether the ancient figures were ever intended astronomically is a separate question, and the classical sources do not make that claim.

The wider pattern is one this atlas meets in several traditions at once. A modern author reworks an old scheme in print, with reasons given, and the reworking then circulates detached from the reasons and from the name attached to them. The atlas records the reworking, the author and the date together, so that a reader can tell a nineteenth-century argument from a Puranic one without having to trace it back.